15 April 2011 – April Fools ads

I thought it might be nice to have a look at the April Fools day ads from this year. April the 1st is the opportunity for serious brands to have a little fun and break away from their usual tone 🙂

The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392). Many writers suggest that the restoration of January 1 as New Year’s Day in the 16th century was responsible for the creation of the holiday, but this theory does not explain earlier references.

What some brands did:

Heineken

Prank with bicycle baskets in Amsterdam – plastic Heineken crates were used to replace existing crates on peoples’ bikes around the city. Leading to a few confused expressions when the cyclist returned to find the bright green boxes instead of their usual ones.

They launched Gmail motion, where instead of using your mouse and keyboard, you use hand and body signals to control the computer and write an email. It was all backed up with great logic by a movement specialist and paralanguage expert.

Virgin Travel told people that Richard Branson had bought Pluto and was planning on having it reinstated as a planet once a specially created ‘deep space vehicle’ had increased the body mass by harnessing space debris and asteroids and dragging them into Pluto’s gravitational field.